


i fear death, your death

by savagelyhandsome



Category: Raven Cycle - Maggie Stiefvater
Genre: Angst, Cabeswater - Freeform, M/M, but then i didn't have the heart, it started as a role switch of noah and barrington, like what if gansey had to kill ronan, mention of noah and adam once lol, super metaphorical idk, they both die
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-17
Updated: 2015-12-17
Packaged: 2018-05-07 05:56:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,374
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5445743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/savagelyhandsome/pseuds/savagelyhandsome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"It's just like falling asleep,"<br/>His movements were growing less and less deliberate by the second.<br/>"You don't even realize it's happening till you wake up."</p>
            </blockquote>





	i fear death, your death

Ronan called weakly, "Gansey." 

The smallness of his voice made Gansey want to crumble into the soil. 

This is not how it was supposed to be.

"You need to-" Ronan grabbed his ankle, his skin touching his, his hand snaking up his pants leg to establish some connection between them. The movement made his breathing hitch and he flinched back. But the feeling of warm skin lingered.

Gansey twitches and swats at his own arm, he _thought_ - 

He _felt-_

"Gansey, I can't protect _us_." Ronan said _us_ like he meant to say _you._

His eyes were dark; maybe the sun gone behind a cloud.

"No." It was a refusal to what was implied.

It didn't sound firm enough. Gansey pulled tighter on his hair, he hated the hesitance. He tried again when there was air in his lungs, "No, Ronan."

The sound of the hornets buzzing did no good to bring rationality to Gansey's mind. His touch was fuzzy, everything was blurring together. Touch, sound, and mind. 

"You need to kill-"

Gansey' snapped, "Shut up for the love of god." He crouched, facing away from Ronan. 

His words cut through the monotonous hum of the trees beyond their moment. 

Time flowed differently here, not straight but almost linear. 

Gansey grit his teeth, pulling at his hair. 

Ronan had never seen this side of Gansey, and neither did he. 

Gansey never felt so out of control. 

This was more than a phone call or conversation; he couldn't win this game because it wasn't a game. 

It was a life. 

Hadn't he already learned with Adam?

Ronan made a noise that sounded like annoyance and defiance, but this manner didn't match the smothering fog of dread that grew thicker and thicker as time grew on. 

Silence, that would've been silence if the low thrum of the forest wasn't there, settled.

Ronan was tired of staring at Gansey's back. Maybe he was just tired, period. 

Ronan nudged Gansey's butt with his foot. 

Gansey didn't turn to see Ronan's slipping knife-like smile. 

Ronan and Cabeswater were interlinked, if Ronan died, so did the forest and all its whispering trees. All things magical, other worldly, and cherished by Gansey would be gone with it. 

"Kill me." Gansey stopped, his hands stilled in his hair.

It was so much as a whisper than it was a beg but it was unlike a Lynch to beg for anything, much less death. This was a request and a statement all in one.

"You can't ask this of me." Gansey pressed a fist to his temple.

"If you don't we'll both die."

Ronan crawled closer; his feeble attempt to sit up was not something Gansey missed.

He tugged on Gansey's sleeve, "You need to kill me. It'll be easy. Just-"

"Stop talking like that."

"Take this, the knife, and I'll be still." Ronan whispered this. "I'll be so still."

Gansey moaned into his fist, he bit down hard. 

"I won't speak." His voice was just loud enough to be heard, "It'll be easy. I'll be quiet, so quiet." 

That was not how Ronan was supposed to die. Not quietly. Not bleeding out from a knife wound. Not at the hand of his best friend in a forest that did not exist.

Finally Gansey turned, tears blurring his vision.

Boys like Ronan did not fall out of time, they burned through it.

When Gansey first met him, his first impression was that someone who hung around Kavinsky would either die in a car crash, explosion, or gunfight. 

Not in Gansey's arms, not in Gansey's arms.

Ronan rubbed circles into his wrist, a ritual comfort that was so wrongfully out of place in this scenario.

 

"I promise." He promised,

_This was not how it was supposed to be._

and, "It should be me."

 

"How would your death would keep me alive?" 

Gansey's voice shook, just like his hands. Ronan's begging would do no good if Gansey's heart beat itself to death where he stood, or crouched.

"This," he threw a hand in the direction of the steel knife where it glinted in the grass, "all for nothing."

Ronan's gaze unfocused suddenly, and Gansey's heart simultaneously leapt to disgusting hope and despair at an inevitability weighing over their heads. 

He shouldn't ever have to make this decision.

"Rational," Ronan gasps, and Gansey exhales a breath he didn't know he was holding. 

"What?" 

"It's the most rational. It'll quicken the inevitable."

Gansey shook his head. He wanted to argue, he _had_ to argue.

"Think of it as a mercy kill."

"Wouldn't it be better if we just-" Gansey ripped grass from the ground. "We could stay here," _die just,_ "like Noah."

But Gansey knew this was not an option, because with Ronan, all things Gansey knew to be magical, otherworldly and worth living for would be dead, for good.

Gansey heard scuffling and leaves being crushed under weight.

"I shouldn't have asked that of you." Ronan murmured, maybe to himself, or the ground, or Cabeswater. Maybe to the person he loved.

When he turned Ronan had gripped the knife in one strangely steady hand. 

 

Gansey didn't even have time to breathe.

Ronan, leaning his back against a trunk and without hesitation dug a deep vertical line down his arm. 

 _Down the road, not across it_.

Blood gushed from the wound and Ronan didn't make so much as a cry, just a soft "Oh," as he was gently surprised by the flow of blood from his arm.

Gansey froze as his mind recalled memories from long ago that had no business here. The church, the pool, there was too much for one person, too much-

_Oh, I must stop the bleeding._

He slowly thought, tongue numb with shock.

Ronan sluggishly moved his hand to hover over his other arm. Gansey lunged for him.

"Gansey-"

He threw the knife past the protective clearing and it hit a bush, leaves rustling, wings humming, insect legs chattering. Buzzing.

He didn't care, he couldn't hear it.

Gansey's head was only tuned into one frequency, the sound of Ronan's slow raspy breathing and his heartbeat. 

Amplified by his _need,_ his _want_ , the only thing he could ask Cabeswater in this moment. 

To hear his heart.

Ronan chuckled weakly, half-hearted, "With Glendower, this truly is some kind of gay twist to a Grimm brother's tale."

He heard a flutter, a falter in Ronan's own or maybe Gansey's heart.

"You stupid-" Gansey breathed, _you selfless moron._

Gansey couldn't continue. The red blended into Ronan's dark jeans but was disturbingly bright against Cabeswater's field flowers and grass.

"You hurt yourself. You're bleeding."

It was something someone said to a child when they fell down or scraped their knee. 

Things you could put a cast on or a bandage. 

Gansey pressed his Aglionby sweater into his wound.

Hornets. He hadn't thought of them at all.

Ronan tried to be reassuring, but failed to lift his arm high enough to rest on Gansey's thigh. This made Gansey feel worst somehow. "I can't feel anything," Ronan rolled his head down to his arm, " I didn't even feel it."

Gansey ignored him, focusing on his fingers. 

They were wet and feverishly warm with the rest of his sweater.

"You can't die, Ronan." This used to be a solid concept in Gansey's mind, as real and factual as air in the atmosphere and round as the earth. 

As real as the ley lines, and Cabeswater.

But both were dying. Boys like Ronan didn't die.

Great waves of buzzing were white noise ringing in their ears; the forest was trembling with it. 

Over time it was becoming more feeling than sound.

Gansey could hear none of it. 

"It's just like falling asleep,"

Another weak pulse.

His eyes, almost glassy, passed over Gansey. 

His movements were growing less and less deliberate by the second.

His eyes were almost looking at him or through him or seeing something that wasn't entirely him.

"You don't even realize it's happening till you wake up." 

Gansey felt something land on his cheek. Two somethings. One was Ronan's hand, smearing a tear.

The second was a wasp.

Gansey leaned into his touch and reached up slowly, holding Ronan's hand in place.

"I've never thought of it that way."

**Author's Note:**

> all started with a role reversal of Noah and Barrington and Gansey and Ronan.  
> ok so ??? explanation bc my writing needs work:
> 
> theres very little backstory but other than gansey and ronan going out to cabeswater by themselves to talk but when they get there the forest feels.. off. and soon after they've gone a bit further, away from the roads and up to the mountains, ronan pauses, and touches the rock under his foot. they've been here before.   
> the forest keeps rearranging, moving the same tumble of rocks that go up into a clustered canopy of trees, over and over, in front of them. a loop.  
> gansey tries not to think. about anything. ronan is kicking a tree and swearing at it and on the other end of the line is nothing but cold harsh and indistinguishable and why the fuck is this happening, fuckin- bastard tree fucks  
> ronan has never been the one for rational measures and after fuming and trying to reach out to cabeswater failed, he goes silent for a bit. gansey doesn't say anything.  
> then, jumping for a low branch and bending it down until it snapped, he angrily ripped all the leaves off of it and then bashed the naked branch against the tree and some bushes, whacking foliage and grinding out enraged utterances that gansey couldn't quite catch from where he was sitting. when ronan was done, he walked back towards the smooth pale faced boulder that gansey was seating on, flicking leaves off his shoulder and swatting assorted plant debris from his buzzed hair. again, still not one for rational measures, he sits on a rock adjacent to gansey. figures that cabeswater will cut the shit and stop manifesting the same smug rock fuckers in their way and leaking tendrils of things from their thoughts, if he threatens it's lifeline. he twitched, head flinching. he could've sworn he felt- something crawl into his ear.  
> his palms grew clammy, grit and dirt caked in the crevices of his hands from the vegetation he abused.  
> ronan didn't know if gansey was hearing the buzzing too.  
> so naturally, as one does, he pulls up the hem of his jeans enough to free the cold steel ebony handle of the spear point obsidian blade. gansey glances at his movement and then rubs a hand over his face, does he even want to fucking know. he's pretty sure the bushes and trees already learned their lesson. what is he gonna do? cut down the forest with a knife? but ronan doesn't do any of that, he, for the most part, does not acknowledge gansey's exasperated and sarcastic laughter. he contemplatively flips the blade, examines the metal edge, handling it with both hands. then he adjusts his grip and gansey had stopped paying attention but not late enough to miss the way ronan's eyes flicked down at his pants leg. and fucking stabs himself in the leg.  
> gansey is sputtering, words clustering on his tongue, but out of the millions of things that rushes through his head that he wants to voice, fuck you ronan is that one that presses to the front. he grunted a little, when he fluidly brought the knife down, the noise which turned gansey's head, nearly snapping his neck, but other wise is unnervingly calm for someone who unhesitatingly plunged a knife into his thigh. he regards the blade wedged through black denim and flesh, the ebbing gush of warm blood, the fabric around the wound are quickly soaked. his fingers touch the wet black of his jeans and come away red. he didn't mean to go that deep, he muses out loud, then appreciatively notes his underestimated sharpness of the blade. gansey loses it.  
> when ronan cuts his arm, he's in perfect control. keeps a steady hand despite the light floating edges of his mind. when he goes for the next arm, he struggles to keep the knife in his grip, hold on the handle weak and he's unable to do it before a warm hand wraps around his wrist and tugs away.  
> ronan told him he couldnt feel anything but looked him in the eye and saw that gansey knew he was lying.
> 
> the wasp was his fault, ronan and his nightmares. carefully concealed and guarded from the forest, but now via cabeswater, the edges were slowly wearing away.  
> Gansey feared hornets, when he closed his eyes after a long night of busying himself and stalling his thoughts. when he was trying, willing sleep to come, it was all he saw.  
> he never thought about it that way.  
> ronan told adam. he doesn't allow himself to dream at monmouth. ronan feared wasps. he feared most of his dream things but all the times he had to drag a sludge heavy garbage bag next to a hole, dug deep enough, weren't possible victories with wasps. not hornets, but still just as deadly. just as haunted as anything else that lingered in the back of ronan's mind of every moment.  
> trash my work


End file.
